I haven't used these things for writing recreationally for a while (since the Claude 3.X days), so my opinions might be outdated - but they definitely weren't bad - after all they had a huge library of witticisms to pull from, and like Stable Diffusion that pulls from master artists, so do LLMs from skilled writers. Pro writers did come up with an absolute dearth of interesting ideas, and there are mountains of skillfully written prose out there - and its all in the training data, and AI is quite good at pulling from it.

The advantage of the writing vs images, is that it takes longer to absorb the whole with text, so its less apparent that the whole thing doesn't quite come together.

My problems was with Claude's prose and ideas is that it kept recycling the tropes and phrases after a while - something that has been observed that these models have very strong statistical biases - when asking for a random number for example, LLMs are far more predictable than even humans, this shows up in unguided writing exercises.

But as for actually crafting text that is both terse and to the point - such as oneliner explanations, or writing summaries - these models are quite bad. The best I have seen is they could turn a given length of prose into an even longer version - with generally some loss in the tonal accuracy or the points made in there.

As such they are a terrible tool for professional communication, but unfortunately, lots of people have started using them for exactly that.

This is just the last domain people can desperately cling to because style is totally subjective.

Depends on the type of writing. Blogs and the like? LLM generates prose that, to me anyway. is unbearable.

However, in fiction I’ve found it a useful collaborator. There have been more than a few occasions when, given some notes of how I want a character’s arc to develop in a particular scene, that the LLM gives some excellent pointers and ‘new’ ideas I hadn’t considered.

As far as editing my prose, I use it as a ‘thesaurus of phrases.’ When lazy, I can give it a rough sketch of the paragraph, giving it the gist of what I want, and have it generate a dozen or so versions. I usually can find nuggets of good phrases therein that are useable… much as I would refer to Roget’s to find a more precise word.

That said, one has to resist tbe temptation of using a chunk of generated text verbatim; no matter how good it sounds in isolation, the repetitive grammatical structure and other LLM-smells add up quick and become nauseatingly obvious if used frequently.

In any case, I think LLM’s get a bad wrap for writing… when used correctly, it is incredibly useful. And, it’s tiresome to hear pretentious snobs assume that an author who uses LLM simply lacks the taste to appreciate how bad the prose sounds. Not true in all cases.

> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more.

This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.

Really hard to take your comment serious when the only post on dvt.name is a hello world page, because at least OP is trying to publish and you are lacking moral high ground to judge him thinking LLM writing is good.